Community services how they can transform care – new Kings Fund Report
This Kings Fund report, compiled through discussions with community trusts, sets out a vision for improving community services to allow more people to be cared for closer to home.
The key features would be community services based around multi-disciplinary teams bringing together GPs, social workers, nurses and therapists. This would reduce fragmentation and resultant confusion to workers and patients. Teams would have generic mental health skills covering dementia and anxiety in people with long-term conditions. The service would be more involved in reaching out to wider communities, including combating social isolation and creating healthy communities. Ideally, services should be co-located and share a single budget. To achieve this new ways of contracting and paying for services are needed; this will involve changes in primary care and hospital contracting arrangements.